Diapositiva 1

1
Partnership
Project Information Project Co-ordinator Prof.
Paolo Dario Scuola Superiore SantAnna -
SSSAP.zza Martiri della Libertà, 33 Pisa
(Italy) Tel [phone] Fax [phone]
Email dario_at_sssup.it
Companies
HW Communications (UK) David Lund dlund_at_hwcomms.co
m
DustBot
RoboTech (I) Nicola Canelli n.canelli_at_robotechsrl.
com
Networked and Cooperating Robots for Urban Hygiene
Robotiker (E) Arantxa Renteria arantxa_at_robotiker.e
s
Synapsis (I) Riccardo Fontanelli r.fontanelli_at_webs
ynapsis.com
Universities
Project Duration 36 months Project Cost
2.822.600 EC contribution 1.898.000 9
partners from 5 countries
HEIG-VD (CH) Stephan Robert stephan.robert_at_marronn
ier.ch
HTA (CH) René Hüsler rhuesler_at_hta.fhz.ch
ORU (S) Achim Lilienthal achim.lilienthal_at_tech.oru
.se
SSSA (I) Paolo Dario dario_at_crim.sssup.it
Research Centres
MIDRA (I) Romano Fantacci romano.fantacci_at_unifi.it
2
Scenario The autonomous and cooperating robots
will be able to clean and remove waste from
squares, streets, parks, in the cities and
monitoring in real time pollutants concentrations
in the air. embedded into an Ambient Intelligence
platform Figure 1. The DustBot
scenario The core of the platform will be
represented by the robots with sensing and
communication capabilities. These robots will be
able to navigate and to communicate wireless with
each other (using state of the art technology in
terms of wireless sensor network), and with an
external environment (e.g. a server PC). The
network of robots will be connected with an
external server for data management and analysis
(databases and data fusion), high level network
management and high level user interface. The
robots will be able to monitor dynamically many
different environmental parameters (physical and
chemical), such as NOX (nitrogen oxides), SOX
(sulphur oxides), O3 (ozone), benzene, CO, CO2,
air temperature, wind speed, etc., providing, if
required, a pre-elaboration of data. Two kind of
robots will be designed and developed in DustBot
the cleaning robot and the citizen-friendly/dust-c
art robot.
Overview The DustBot project is aimed at
designing, developing, testing and demonstrating
a system for improving the management of urban
hygiene based on a network of autonomous and
cooperating robots, embedded in an Ambient
Intelligence (AmI) infrastructure. The robots
will be able to operate in partially unstructured
environments (such as squares, streets, parks,
etc.) and to vacuum-clean them from rubbish and
dirt. They will be able to transport small
quantities of home garbage, collected on demand
from citizens, at their doors. By using preloaded
information on the environment (e.g. area maps)
and inputs from on-board and external sensory
systems, and by taking advantage of the benefits
provided by the Ambient Intelligence platform,
the robots will be able to move with a proper
(and selectable) level of autonomy to carry out
their tasks. The robots will be also equipped
with multiple sensors for the monitoring of
atmospheric pollutants (e.g. nitrogen oxides
NOx-, sulphur oxides SOx-, ozone -O3-, benzene,
COx, etc.), giving information on the
environmental quality in real time. Robots will
work as mobile stations, which will monitor
pollutants levels in highly populated areas (e.g.
pedestrian, central areas). Acquired data will be
also transferred onto dedicated databases by
utilizing the features of the ubiquitous
communications network. The robots and sensors
will be part of an Ambient Intelligence platform,
which will integrate not only sensors and tools
for monitoring the environment and robot tasks
execution, but also communications backhaul
systems during clean up/emergency operations,
databases technologies, and knowledge discovery
in databases (KDD) processes for extracting and
increasing knowledge on urban hygiene management.
Following the computation on stored data,
feedback will be sent back to human actors
(supervisors, decision makers, like municipality
managers, etc.) and/or robotic operators, in
order to perform actions.
The cleaning robot will be equipped with the
cleaning tools and with the environmental sensors
modules. The citizen friendly/dust-cart robot
will be equipped with the ?cart for bin-liner
transport and discharge and with the user
interface aimed to provide selected information
about air quality and waste management to
different users. The DustBot platform will be a
complex, distributed and heterogeneous AmI
environment and it will be able to automatically
sense when resources, software components or
communication networks need to be reallocated or
re-configured and to perform the necessary
adjustments reducing the human interventions.
Figure 2. The Architecture of the AmI
Core Demonstration Sites A demonstration phase
has been planned aims at demonstrating the
functionality and potentiality of the DustBot
platform and to evaluate the performance of the
system from a user and technological point of
view. Five demonstrators will be set up in real
operational scenarios during the last eight
months of the project, in collaboration with
local Municipalities in different sites, which
have been preliminarily selected in Italy, Spain
and Sweden.